Thanksgiving Preaching

Elizabeth won’t let me preach Thanksgiving. At least not anymore. Apparently, I’m too dark with my words.

There’s a skill to preaching Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving meditation should be a simple, short message. Uplifting. Just tell people to give thanks. That gratefulness is an important characteristic of our lives as Christians. This is not one of my gifts as a preacher.

I still remember the first Thanksgiving I preached. The text was Matthew 6:25-33. The part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount where he tells us not to worry. Not to be anxious about anything. It wasn’t a bad sermon overall—it was just a terrible sermon for Thanksgiving. Somehow I got into all of the things that we have to worry about in life—hitting the grief and the job loss and the health concerns—and then made the point that God doesn’t promise that life will be easy for us—just that God will provide what we need. And that’s cause for Thanksgiving, no matter how dark your life might be right now. Expressions on people’s faces were all a bit shocked as they filed out that morning. Not quite what they had prepared themselves for as they headed off to church that morning. My notes for the sermon that day read simply, “Thanksgiving—a bit heavy.”

Another year I preached the story of the crossing of the Red Sea from the book of Exodus and the song of deliverance Miriam sang after the Israelites were safely on the other side. I emphasized how our deliverance should be a deep source of thanksgiving in our hearts—and then spent most of the sermon emphasizing all the dark and evil things we had been delivered from.

Then there was the Thanksgiving sermon on the ten lepers Jesus heals in the book of Luke where only one of them came back to thank Jesus. Somehow the sermon ended up being a stern warning not to be like the nine who didn’t bother to give thanks.

And who could forget the infamous Thanksgiving sermon from the book of Job? (Okay—I made that one up).

But the point is, Elizabeth won’t let me preach Thanksgiving. Because I tend to be too dark. And regardless of what passage I pick, my message usually ends up being something along the lines of: no matter how dark and gloomy your life might be, it’s still possible to give thanks. Most years, that doesn’t work so well for a Thanksgiving meditation. It’s perfectly true—but it’s not the simple, uplifting message people need to hear most Thanksgivings.

But this year isn’t like most Thanksgivings. This year, we’re in the midst of a pandemic. And we’ve already lost so much—we’ve given up holidays, vacations, time with family and friends. Some of us have lost jobs and others of us loved ones. It seems like everyday there’s a new sense of grief as a new loss takes hold in our lives. This year, perhaps more than any other, we need to hear that Thanksgiving message that no matter how dark our lives might become, we are still children of God. We are still redeemed by God. We are still deeply loved by God. We are still held by God. And that—that—is indeed reason to give thanks, no matter what else is going on in our lives.

Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to preach a simple, uplifting Thanksgiving meditation. Maybe one of these years, Elizabeth will let me give it another try. But until then, I was born to preach Thanksgiving 2020.

The Rituals of Our Lives

A few weeks ago I completed an annual fall ritual—I put up the plastic film covering the skylights in our bedroom. The skylights are high-quality, double-paned windows, but they are right above where we sleep. Without the added plastic film in the winter, there’s just enough of a cold draft to make it hard for me to sleep.

I always resist putting up the plastic as long as possible. It’s an admission that the warmth and sunshine of summer are gone and all that lies ahead until spring is cold and gloom. The plastic covers the whole cutout for the window, so once the plastic goes up, we can no longer reach the window to raise or lower the blinds. So most years we lower the blinds before putting the plastic up—this makes it darker at night when we’re trying to sleep, but it also means our bedroom is that much darker all day long as well. And those precious few days in the winter when the sun does manage to break through the clouds, our bedroom stays a dark and gloomy place.

The skylights are built into the slanted roof of our house. Because they’re on a slant, the plastic has a particularly difficult time staying put. This means that inevitably, the first night I put the plastic up, the double-sided tape they give you to put on the frame of the window starts to give way and we wake up in the middle of the night with plastic falling down on top of us. This usually results in me trying to add a layer or two of packing tape around the outside edge of the plastic the next morning.

All this to say that by springtime, when the first warm breeze arrives and the voice of the turtle is again heard in the land, and I rip off the plastic like I’m a kid opening a Christmas gift and crank open the skylights to let that breeze into the stale air of the upstairs, the walls around the skylights are in rough shape. Indeed, as I pull the plastic off, I inevitably pull a layer or two of paint off with it. I’ve learned to keep a generous supply of touch up paint that color in the house.

Sometimes I even take some of the drywall mud off with the paint, and there’s a bit of a gouge in the wall above our bed where the plastic had been hanging. Just as putting up the plastic is a fall ritual, so repairing the wall when I take the plastic down is a spring ritual. Only, I don’t always get to it in the spring. I typically tear down the plastic on a whim, deciding that spring is finally here—or at least right around the corner—and we won’t need this plastic any longer and the lure of the fresh breeze overcomes my fear of the nightly draft. I can tear down the plastic in about three minutes, but it can take a couple of hours over the course of a couple of days to repair and repaint the walls—especially if it takes more than one coat.

And so I don’t always get to it right away. And as the weather turns nice in the spring, there are so many other things I’d rather be doing outside than repairing the walls inside our bedroom. And so, I’m afraid to say, more years than not, the walls stay gouged all summer long—with me thinking that I’ll get to that one of these days… And then fall comes. And it’s time to put the plastic back up—only the walls aren’t fixed yet, so I figure I better do that first. So many years, it’s not until I need to put the plastic back up that I finally get around to repairing the walls from when I tore the plastic down in the spring.

Elizabeth is gracious about the whole cycle, and mostly just shakes her head as she sees me head up to the bedroom with a can of paint at the end of October. It is an odd, somewhat humorous, somewhat frustrating ritual that we go through each year. And in a strange way, it marks the passing of the seasons, the passing of time, perhaps as well as anything else in our lives—especially this year as the usual birthday celebrations, Thanksgiving and Christmas will all look dramatically different because of the coronavirus.

This summer Elizabeth and I had the pleasure of conducting the wedding of Joshua Hiemstra and Meredith Fennema. It was a small wedding, outdoors in Meredith’s parents’ backyard. One of the texts Josh and Meredith selected was 1 Samuel 7:13-17. It’s a bit of an obscure text—it details the later years of Samuel’s life as prophet in Israel, and it describes him as traveling from town to town to town in a large circuit and repeating this year after year after year. Living out his life in faithful service.

We pointed out to them that this was not a typical wedding text, but they wanted to use it anyway—they liked the idea of the routine being holy. Of our everyday actions being service to God. Of the rituals of our lives—whether they are the daily rituals or the monthly rituals or the yearly rituals—being a sign of our faithfulness and love.

Indeed, the rituals of our lives mark off our lives—but they are so much more than mere timekeepers. Regardless of whether they are the daily rituals or the yearly rituals, they can be a mark of our faithfulness. A sign of our love. A way we orient our lives to God and to others. It doesn’t matter whether we are married or single, our faith is primarily lived out in our everyday, day-to-day and year-to-year actions.

Next spring, when the plastic comes down again and the paint comes off the walls with it, I’m going to look at the ritual of wall repair in a whole new light. And hopefully, when October rolls around, I won’t be heading upstairs with a can of paint in my hands.

Comfort from Job and Skywoman

The reading this morning in Teach Us to Pray was from Job 23:1-3, 8-10 (and it’s in the NIV Readers translation):

Even today my problems are more than I can handle.

In spite of my groans, God’s hand is heavy on me.

I wish I knew where I could find him!

I wish I could go to the place where he lives!

 

But if I go to the east, God isn’t there.

If I go to the west, I don’t find him.

When he’s working in the north, I don’t see him there.

When he turns to the south, I don’t see him there either.

 

But he knows every step I take.

When he has tested me,

I’ll come out as pure gold.

 

This resonated with me. Even today, in my warm comfortable home, with two of my children still in school in person, with plans to meet a dear friend for a walk, with work and people I love, with so much to be thankful for – ‘my problems are more than I can handle.’ Mark, a friend of our family whom I’ve known since childhood died yesterday. Harvey DeWent died last week and Jay and I weren’t allowed to be there. I’m afraid for a friend who has COVID, dreading that schools might close again, worried Bri won’t ever get to go in person this year, concerned for many of you and wondering when we’ll see each other in person again. My list could go on and on with problems and griefs (anticipated and real) that are or feel like they are more than I can handle.

 

One of the books I’ve been reading these days is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In it she tells the story of Skywoman, a creation story told by the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes area. It’s a story of a woman falling from the sky world, who lands on a giant turtle and is kept alive by various creatures, from whom she receives gifts and with whom she shares gifts. And then Kimmerer writes this:

 

Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles under our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us. (p 8,9)

 

The sense that our problems are more than we can handle, the sense of falling, is part of being human, of knowing and accepting our limits, our creatureliness. It’s good to tell the truth about this – we are not in control. We can’t solve all our problems or keep ourselves from falling. And sometimes God’s presence can feel really elusive – like Job says, ‘I don’t find him . . . I can’t see him.’

 

And yet. As Kimmerer puts it, ‘the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.’ I keep returning to Jesus’ words about the birds and the flowers and how God takes care of them, and God can be trusted to take care of us too – day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Even when we can’t see God, we can see God’s gifts: breath, food, life.

 

Job promises and testifies: ‘God knows every step I take.’ I found such comfort in this passage when we did a series on Job several years ago, and again today. The reminder that God knows us inside and out, God is paying attention, watching us with a loving gaze. And pointing toward Jesus: who knows what it is to be human, to be limited, to grieve, to live in difficult times when many things are out of our control. Jesus goes before us and he goes with us and he knows what is happening to us – the burdens we bear, the choices we face, the joys and sorrows and gifts of each day.

Life Renovations

We’re thinking about renovating our kitchen. Any suggestions or helpful hints are welcome. 

To be honest, we’ve been thinking about renovating our kitchen since we bought the house seventeen years ago. To the point where the spot where my dad spilled some glue on our linoleum floor when trying to repair the countertop the first year we moved in is still there—we just always figured it would get cleaned up when we renovated the kitchen. And we have three different colors of main appliances—the stove and microwave are bisque since they matched the refrigerator that was there when we moved in, the dishwasher is black since appliances no longer came in bisque when we bought the dishwasher, and the refrigerator is now stainless steel since when our refrigerator needed to be replaced we figured we’d move toward stainless steel for all of them when we finally did the renovation at some point in the hopefully not-too-distant future. Oh—and there’s a large section of linoleum that’s been missing in our dining room for the past two years since our dog Luna chewed it up when she was a puppy. At the time, we figured we’d wait until the renovation (that was supposed to be right around the corner…) to fix it when we put in new flooring.

We have friends who redid their kitchen a few years ago, and when we ask them what they like about it or what advice they have for us, the thing they keep saying is, “We love it. Don’t know why we didn’t do it long ago.” And to be honest, as we begin envisioning what our kitchen might one day be, the thought that keeps coming back to me is—we should have done this a long time ago.

Seventeen years ago, we could have had matching appliances. Seventeen years ago, we could have had drawers with gliders on them so we’re not constantly working on controlling our tongue when they inevitably bind up and get jammed. Seventeen years ago we could have had walls that aren’t all marked up from the previous owner’s chairs scraping against the wall. We should have done this long ago.

There’s a lot in the Christian life that we should have done long ago. If Jesus Christ is your Lord, Paul admonishes the church in his letter to the Colossians, live your lives in him. Be rooted and built up in him. Strengthened in the faith you were taught and overflowing with thankfulness (2:6-7). He encourages us to put to death anything that belongs to our earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed (3:5). And he goes on and adds anger and rage and malice and slander and filthy language. Do not lie to each other, he says—this is all part of your old self.

And then he says something remarkable: you are a new self. You are a new person in Christ. You’re being renewed. You’re being renovated—in the knowledge and image of your Creator (3:10). And as part of this renovation, as part of this renewal, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another. And over all these virtues put on love, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts (3:12-15).

I like to think I’m fairly far along in this renovation process. I’m a pastor, after all. But if I’m truly honest with myself, I have a lot of work yet to do. There are a lot of corners of my life that aren’t what they should be. Mostly little things that I’ve never bothered to address. That I’ve ignored or said to myself, “I’ll deal with that later.” Or “That’s not really such a big deal.” But then I think about what my life might look like if I cleaned all that up—if I truly clothed myself with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience. If I was better able to bear with others and forgive easily. If I put love over all things, and if I let the peace of Christ rule in my heart—and I think to myself: I should have done this long ago.

The truth is…unless we’re intentional, unless we make it a priority, it’s surprisingly easy to wake up seventeen years later and realize we haven’t made much progress in this renovation project. 

The good news, thankfully, is that we’re not ultimately responsible for producing this change. God is at work in us. Paul tells us we are being renewed. But renovations go a whole lot smoother and a whole lot faster when they have willing participants. And workers that don’t keep putting off the work that needs to be done.

I’m grateful that I’m farther along in the renovation of my life than Elizabeth and I are in the renovation of our kitchen. And yet this current election cycle has reminded me of how far I have yet to go until that renovation is complete. I look at all with which Paul tells us to clothe ourselves—compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, love, and peace—and I set them beside all I’ve felt and experienced in the last eight months, what I’ve thought and felt about some people, and I almost begin to cry. There seems to be a lot more “old self” than “new self.” And the one that’s really getting me right now is that, especially the last few days, that peace of Christ, for which my soul longs, has been terribly elusive. 

Paul helps me see what my life might be if I clothed myself fully with Christ. I long for the day when all those things are just who I am, all the time. For the day when it is almost always “new self” rather than far too often “old self.” I wish I had started on it long ago.